


even my failures, in poetry, please me

by gogollescent



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 07:37:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1974441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt, "Annie/NB!Armin bodyswap."</p>
            </blockquote>





	even my failures, in poetry, please me

She was always conscious. Of what—well, you try not to speculate. Later she would claim that she knew what you were doing before you did, although that might just have been her way of comforting you. She knew. She did nothing. She preferred what you were planning to an eternity in stone. The dark irresolute input of moving, arguing scouts—her eyes were closed and sealed, but if you had to guess, you would say Annie always knew where the light was. And even if detecting shadows was beyond her, she must have known when living bodies brushed against the rock. The brief press of Hanji’s burnt fingertips; the ghostly circumference traced by Eren’s exhale around the mark of his mouth. Certainly, she had—has?—gave _you_ a nose for heat.

In the moment, however, arm-deep in her shell, she looked like a sleeping old crone. Her face untimely lined by the crystal’s vertices. You also felt aged. “If you can, Eren,” you told him. “—Even if you can’t.” You held out your hand, as he had done for you when you were boys.

It was noon aboveground, and midnight below it. His palm against yours was slick as an animal’s maw. His other hand he laid flat against the crystal, while his head sank down almost to his breast—unseeing, but with none of Annie’s chill serenity. He had never prayed to anything in all the time you knew him, which was a pity, because in the end his business was worshipping himself; not his goodness, or his anger, but something he had not imagined and could never see. Trust in his heart. His thumb across the back of your hand, rolling the bones like a half-opened wing.

He was no longer your foremost concern. Annie, you thought, my god. Let me in. The drops of sweat on Eren’s forehead, his tornado-green eyes, fell away—

“ _Armin?_ "

It wasn’t fair. She had compatriots stored in your walls, your least defenses; her allies listened in on Sina from above, and paid witness to humanity’s corrupted, thready heart. She was in Eren when he fought, and you when you smiled. She was everywhere, and made room for no one, in her locked, secret, airless meat.

But you understood her. Could infect her. Would finish her remains.

 

—There was a flash of white. That much, you both agree on.

 

"Armin," Annie says, when you see each other again. When you see—yourself, not in a mirror, or faintly brushed on the flat of a jewel. She sits quietly before drawn curtains, in the body that housed you for sixteen years. Her expression one of fastidious disbelief: under the bruise.

"Hello, Annie."

This with small difficulty. You once assumed that strength, when you came by it, would make life easier. Not speech, or all your tense ideas for change; but _life—_ the moment-to-moment assertion that you deserved to kill, by breath, by cost, by folly: that, once, took almost all your nerve. You thought, given an ounce more power, it might be otherwise. You might feel free to waste; to use without apology. And you were right. Your body wasn’t such a terrible tool, in the grand scheme of things. It might have done nothing you asked of it—might have failed you whenever you were most hopeful—but at the last moment, it let you go; and wasn’t it your fault, after all, mistaking a steel trap for a blade?

It reassures you that Annie mistook it too. When the change was made: surrounded, disoriented, in a skin which she could break but not outgrow, she fought and failed. It had nothing, after all, to do with force of will.

But you try not to take too much solace in the notion. You are still learning to use Annie’s hard arms and heavy hips, and who’s to say that when the confusion passes she won’t come to wield your body in ways you never dreamed up? But here and now, seated across from her in the unthinkable freedom of daylight—her white face turned habitually, uselessly, to the sun—you are well pleased. A childish reason for contentment: you could never have done other than you did.

"Is this the silent treatment?" Annie asks. "Or is the torture making me look at what you’ve done to this frail girl’s hair? I know you’re not a _woman_ , Armin, but really, you could make the attempt. Not just—hack it off. How do you know it grows back? Just because that’s what happens for humans. Did you ever see Bertholdt or Reiner shave? Imagine if I cut off something as precious to you. Something which, in my own body, would have healed by morning, in the sun…”

"Sorry," you offer, shaking yourself back to the present. You run an idle hand through the brutally shortened mop. "I thought it would be easiest. Eren sometimes calls me the wrong name, otherwise."

"Oh?" Amusement, as felt by Annie, looks unnatural on you. Her smiles don’t market teeth. "Is that in the barracks, or out of them?"

That you ignore. “I came here to ask you something.”

"Go on," says Annie, her tone peculiarly inward—almost contrite. "I’ve been treated rather well, if that’s what you’re wondering. Let me guess: you might want your own face back, when you’ve had your fun with mine?"

"No," you say, briefly. "Annie, I haven’t been able to make a complete Titan body yet. What I’ve got… It doesn’t look like yours."

There’s a silence. She picks idly at the cuff of her roughspun shirt, which has been washed so many times that you can see the silhouette of her ribs through the fabric, foiled by filtered-dull sun. The sun through undyed linen, like gold plate somehow tarnished. You are reminded by this, more than by her threats or speculation, what power she has: to skin your arms with your nails. To take off the shirt and turn around. It would hardly mean anything, now. Less than the screen of vapor, rising, off a Titan’s just-felled bulk.

"That’s to be expected," says Annie with a shrug. In her brusqueness you locate more than one gentle note. "Did you think it was genetic, soldier? My mother can’t shift. My father—knees too deformed to walk. They bend right under him."

"Really?"

"No."

"A metaphor, then."

"I have a question too," says Annie, sweeping her arm across the table as though to knock over every marker on a map. There’s nothing to disturb except the dusty sheen on the wood. Her hand comes to rest on one corner, and falls. She has leaned over far enough to touch you, but she’s weak, weak; you know just how weak she is. "Yes, a question. Armin. If you’re not coming back. Will you let Eren teach you how to spar?"


End file.
